The Victorian Science Museum is based in Glaisdale near Whitby. Yorkshire Post photographer, Tony Johnson went along to chat to owner, Anthony Swift, about why it is so appealing.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 I'm Anthony Swift, I run the Museum of Victorian Science and we're at Glasdale near Whitby,
00:07 North Yorkshire.
00:13 It's a science museum and we've been open 22 years and we cover subjects like x-rays,
00:20 radioactivity, electrostatics, phosphorescence, fluorescence, all sorts of things, but we
00:28 have a humour side as well, so it's a sort of entertainment plus education. We start
00:35 off with x-rays and we do x-rays and we're in the dark a lot, we see the first x-ray
00:40 ever made and the subject of its discovery. Then we do radioactivity and how the Curies
00:47 made their, discovered their elements of polonium, radium and actinium and so forth. And we move
00:54 on and do other subjects of physics, not in an in-depth way of a university, obviously
01:01 we're not doing that, but enough for people who don't know too much about science to be
01:08 interested.
01:09 I've collected this sort of stuff for many, many years. We moved here, this was my wife's
01:16 mother's house when she died and we moved here. And I'd got all this stuff out and she
01:21 said, "Do you know, all this junk", as she called it, "collected, you could make a museum
01:28 of this." Well, ding-a-ling, and we made a museum of it and we've been open 22 years.
01:34 They've all got names, they were all used in the 19th and early 20th century in the
01:40 discovery of physics matter. Some people come here, they know absolutely nothing. Some people
01:46 are professors of particle physics, we get the whole range of everybody, it doesn't matter.
01:52 Obviously I'm very interested in what I do, yes, it's my subject, but I don't know about
01:57 passion. People do use this word a lot, I'm not too happy with it, but yes, it's what
02:04 consumes me, yes.
02:12 [Sound of saw]
02:14 [Sound of saw]